When a local Muslim activist told Chuck Warpehoski that the FBI was using undercover informants to collect information on people attending mosques, he knew that the issue could not be ignored. After all, Warpehoski said, his group, the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, had once been the target of FBI surveillance during the Vietnam War.
A Muslim group that opposes the introduction of Shari‘a, or Islamic law, in Canada, is urging the federal government to ban the wearing of the burqa in public, saying it “marginalizes women.”
In addition to the burqa, a garment that covers the entire body with only a mesh screen for the eyes, the Muslim Canadian Congress is also calling for a ban on the niqab, a veil covering head and the face that allows only a slit for the eyes.
Early in October, Yale was abuzz with passionate debates about the freedom of expression. Participants included Yale students and professors, as well as prominent alumni such as John Bolton (former U.S. ambassador to the UN) and David Frum (economic speechwriter for former president George W. Bush). Also present was Kurt Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist who drew a famous caricature of the Prophet Muhammad with his turban morphing into a bomb with a lit fuse—one in a series of cartoons on Islam published in a Danish newspaper that set off a worldwide reaction.
Amid widely different estimates of the size of the world’s Muslim population, a new demographic study has determined that followers of Islam represent nearly a quarter of the world’s current population, with nearly two-thirds of them living in Asia.
The study, released October 7 and conducted by the Washington-based Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, found that 1.57 billion people are Muslims out of an estimated total world population of 6.8 billion.